Cemetery of Splendour film review ★★★★★

The set-up to Cemetery of Splendour is promising. In a Thai village, soldiers afflicted by a ‘sleeping sickness’ are housed in a temporary clinic set up in a former school building. A former pupil of the school (Jenjiri Pongpas Widner), now a middle-aged volunteer, develops an attachment to one of the soldiers.

This attachment might have something to do with her insomnia, which abates after she spends time in the clinic, or it might be due to some deeper loneliness or yearning.

It’s hard to tell, however, as director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has shot most of the film with a wide-angle lens, marooning the actors in the centre of the screen. It’s a testament to Pongpas Widner’s performance that her character (also called Jenjiri) comes across as so engagingly mischievous.

She is the saving grace in a film that you can see critics describing as ‘a mood painting’, ‘a dream song’, or ‘an atmospheric meditation on what it means to be human.’

But Cemetery of Splendour might better be described as a typical art-house film. Certainly it is guilty of many art-house mannerisms. There is a reliance on symbolic colouring, there is elliptical and allusive dialogue, and there are deathless static shots of things like trees moving in the wind.

Fans of Weerasethakul will want to see this, but if you're new to the director there are better starting places.